One portion of this article/interview at Searchenginejournal.com about Hewlett Packard’s in-house SEO team caught my interest. About halfway into the article Jessica and Tanya discuss the utilization of external SEO resources to augment your in-house team and resources.

Jessica: I always tell in-house search marketers that you need outside council, just like a corporate attorney has outside council to discuss issues and an accountant has an auditor that ensures everything is accurate. HP is a company that has an in-house SEO, and still engages an SEO firm for both outside council and to do SEO work. What do you use the SEO firm for and how do you decide which tasks go to the SEO firm vs. doing yourself.

Tanya: I rely on my SEO firm to answer or find the answer to any questions I can’t. They also have some more technical resources that can consult on code development to our developers when they’re trying to make certain sites more search engine friendly. They also get on calls with me to IT when I need a little more backing. I also rely on them for bandwidth. They’re my extended team so a lot of what I need done gets done by them because I know I can tell them what I need and they’ll deliver. There are some things I prefer to do myself. One is to consult with other teams that are just getting up to speed on SEO. Then once they get excited and ready to do some serious SEO projects, I hook them up with our SEO vendor. But if they’re only going to optimize a page or two and have a really short turn-around, I walk them through some of the basics and provide guidance or specific recommendations myself. I also do some of the ad-hoc reporting myself (regular reporting I leave to the agency) and I manage the intranet SEO Program site and all communications regarding SEO (not to mention the standard company stuff you get to participate in as an employee!)

I can see needing advice from time to time, but I don’t agree with them nor do I think the analogies apply.

I personally wouldn’t feel comfortable outsourcing any portion of our SEO or consulting with an outside firm. Some of the old school guys have trained me to keep everything as close to the chest as possible.

Most SEOs have strong tech skills and you’ll obviously know the goals of the campaign. If you need to make code more search engine friendly within a language you are familar then you make suggestions directly, or you can assign it to one of your team members. As I discussed in this post, in a large company you should have a team of SEOs. That said, if you aren’t familiar with the language, your developers should be! Arrange a meeting, or series of meetings, with the developers and their managers. Clearly explain the goals and brainstorm available techniques and steps to achieve those goals.

If these deep IT issues are a recurring them then you can justify hiring a tech SEO for your team to work with the rest of the IT team.

Do you outsource of any your internal work? Do you utilize any outside consultants?